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Originally Posted by GusJohnsonGOAT
24/7 is awesome. The WC is garbage. I just don't watch it. Pro sports don't need gimmicks, but the NHL does because of stupid things like having a hockey team in Phoenix and not putting your games on ESPN. And if ESPN bought the contract, they could put games on ABC. I never got the network TV argument. ESPN has rights to a network station as well.
Are you leveling?
ESPN sucked for hockey. Yes, ESPN is the channel most often simply on, sans audio, in bars, so the NHL does lose out on that audience. The network they're on has changed names twice and is hard to find in another city. However, ESPN had zero interest in growing hockey. ESPN used hockey the way it uses poker now - to patch holes in the programming landscape.
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Bettman is far more interested in every stupid gimmick he can run than actually following a sound business model. Yeah, let's put hockey in the south and **** Canada. And of course don't put your games on the most popular cable sports channel in America; that would be silly.
How often do you think hockey would be on ESPN1, now that ESPN has the NBA? Remember that ESPN did not have the NBA through the 90s. The NBA and ESPN make much more sense together. The NBA is a non-regional league - since it's likely that your local team has zero chance of winning the championship, you probably have a second 'national' team that you like. Inter-conference matchups in the NHL are blah - a matchup of Red Wings-Penguins during the regular season is kinda who cares, but Lakers-Heat is a huge deal.
Of course let's also remember that both Winnipeg and Quebec were up for sale and that anyone could have bought them and kept them in the parent cities, but no one wanted to. Let's also remember that Edmonton was rumored to move quite often. The Canadian dollar was doing terribly for much of the 90s and 00s and it was causing a serious problem, even though as I recall, the league matched Canadian dollars for American dollars when it came to paying out player salaries for all the non-Leafs, non-Habs teams. Canada loved hockey, but in an expanding hockey market, it wasn't able to compete. Things have changed, hockey stopped being trendy in the US, and the Canadian dollar is doing far better.
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Oh yeah, and move the Islanders to an arena that holds 14,500 for hockey. You really couldn't have had this arena planned better for hockey?
The Barclays Center was planned in the mid 2000s when money was cheap and it was assumed that Charles Wang could get Nassau County to pony up for a new building for the Islanders. The building simply wasn't designed for hockey because if the Islanders weren't going to move there, and it looked like they weren't, who the hell else was going to?
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Originally Posted by MicroBob
I do not believe that the fact it is still on is evidence that non hockey fans are watching. I don't know if they are or are not. But saying that still being on is proof non hockey fans are watching doesn't seem correct to me.
HBO doesn't really release ratings, but hockey does not get great ratings anywhere, ever. So my theory is that non-diehards are watching because if it was just diehards, it wouldn't be on anymore. I didn't say non-hockey fans, because there is an enormous difference. I will watch a Tuesday night game NBCS between the Capitals and Senators. Most 'hockey fans' in the US do not.